by Alice Castle
Beth’s opinion of the man instantly took a dive. Doctors shouldn’t patronise the elderly. And Wendy wasn’t even that far gone in years.
‘I’m not hard of hearing, young man. And no, I most certainly did not take the stuff myself,’ said Wendy with what Beth had to admit was understandable asperity. Perhaps this was where she got her own occasional feistiness from, she recognised. If so, then she owed Wendy. It was definitely useful to have an aversion to being talked down to. Though, if you were Beth and Wendy’s height, it was an occupational hazard.
‘Can you tell us any more about atropine poisoning? Where would you even find atropine?’ Beth asked.
‘I wouldn’t go looking for it, young lady,’ the doctor said severely, peering over his glasses and losing even more points.
For a second, Beth wondered if she should say, ‘I’m not actually that stupid, young man,’ but it would sound ridiculous. And wouldn’t get them better treatment for Wendy, if she did have to stay in for longer. She contented herself with giving him her most malevolent glare instead. Unfortunately, he seemed to have the sort of armour-plated ego that was impervious even to a Beth death-ray stare. He simply adjusted his glasses and carried on talking very loudly to Wendy.
‘The discharge nurse will be round later and will talk you through anything you’ll need to watch out for. We’ll let you go tomorrow morning. Of course, come back if you feel any onset of your symptoms,’ he said.
‘All right then, Doctor,’ Wendy shouted back.
‘And maybe we should get your hearing tested. I find people speak loudly when they can’t hear,’ the doctor said, walking away with a stiff back.
‘Or when they can’t make themselves heard,’ Beth muttered.
Wendy gave her a complicit smile and they shared a rare moment of unspoken accord.
‘So, atropine. Have you heard of that before?’ Beth asked. ‘Anyone you know taking it?’
Wendy shook her head, lying back on the pillows. Was she paler, or was she just making the most of her moment in hospital? Hard to know. Beth shook her head and had a go at Googling atropine on her phone, but the 3G connection was slower than Ben tidying his room under duress. And any attempts to connect herself to the hospital’s Wi-Fi involved her in filling out a questionnaire about everything from her inside leg measurement to her earliest memories, all of which she was pretty sure would be sold to the highest bidder to keep the hospital’s consultants in free parking spaces. She gave up crossly. It was something she’d have to do when she was home.
‘You don’t need to stay,’ quavered Wendy with her eyes shut. ‘You’ve been so good, but you must have things that you need to be getting on with…’
Just a bit, thought Beth, trying not to picture the in-tray at work, which must by now be like a relief map of the Himalayas. Not to mention Ben (though he’d actually be more than fine going off to school with Charlie); Colin, who’d be cluttering up poor Katie’s house; and Magpie, who’d no doubt be simmering with rage at being left home alone.
‘No, that’s fine, Mum. It’s important that you’ve got everything sorted out to go home,’ Beth said with resignation. As she knew from personal experience, leaving hospital was strangely difficult these days. Yes, you could sign a form saying you were flouting medical advice and taking yourself off, but to do that you had to find someone with the form in the first place, and then someone else to hand it back to. No easy matter, when nurses were thin on the ground and doctors were so over-stretched that you hesitated to buttonhole one lest a patient somewhere else died of neglect. And waiting for the discharge sister was like trying to spot a wild rhino on the African plain.
She sighed a little. ‘Shall I go and get you a cup of coffee or something?’
‘No, no, sit here and we’ll have a nice chat. When do we get the opportunity for that nowadays? You’re always so busy, rushing around with all your hobbies. I hardly get a look in,’ Wendy said with one of her tinkling laughs.
Beth gathered up her bag, all of a sudden too angry to speak. Her major ‘hobby’ was making enough money to feed herself and her child, not to mention the four-footed dependents they had acquired along the way. Once she’d got her voice under enough control, she said tersely, ‘I’ll pop to the canteen. Back soon.’
She walked along the corridor, her rubber soles squeaking painfully on the lino like tortured mice. Wendy had been supported by her husband all her married life, then cushioned by his plethora of delicious insurance policies after his death. She’d never had to tangle for a moment with the hell of grocery receipts that unfurled like streamers to a depth unmatched by her pockets. Not to mention all the other bills that jostled for a place in Beth’s nightmares. And that was without the self-inflicted agony of the looming Wyatt’s school fees.
If only James had insured himself up to the hilt, as her father had. If only she’d taken out a couple of policies on him herself… but she hadn’t. It had seemed absurd to worry about lightning striking twice, and James had been young and fit. And, frankly, they’d both been stupid.
Never mind, thought Beth, squeaking along frantically now. If the worst came to the worst, they could always eat Colin. No, they couldn’t, she thought immediately, not even able to joke in a tiny corner of her mind about sacrificing that pure soul. Magpie, maybe? Beth smiled crookedly. They’d never catch her, even if they were brave enough to try. That cat had a sixth sense about human needs and emotions. Very much unlike Beth’s own mother.
Once she’d got to the canteen – optimistically rechristened a café but still producing the same lacklustre fare – Beth calmed down a lot. There was something about seeing all the hardworking NHS staff in their variously coloured scrubs that instantly made her certain she was leading a charmed life compared to the people who had to battle, day in day out, with the crumbling edifice that tried its best to keep them all in one piece.
She fetched a cup of tea and scanned the place for a vacant seat, eventually spotting one in the far corner. She wedged herself in, with her back to two women in lovely purple scrubs. At the other end of her own six-seater table was another woman, in pale blue. Not knowing the code, Beth tried to work out what everyone did. Sometimes, when you had a massive puzzle on your mind (and she could choose here between the murder of Alfie Pole, the attempted murder of her mother, or where the school fees were going to come from), it could be quite therapeutic to pick away at a lesser conundrum. The women in purple obligingly struck up a conversation.
‘So I said to him, no-one’s ever going to believe you’re single, if you keep that dirty great wedding ring on.’
‘You didn’t!’
The pair collapsed in giggles.
Meanwhile, the slender woman in blue picked up her buzzing phone.
‘No, it’s your time to collect her. No, I did say so. Yes, I’m sure.’
Easy-peasy, thought Beth. The purples were nurses, the blue was a surgeon. Next question. But then the girls in purple spoke up again.
‘So, we’d better get to it. I’m assisting with a thoracotomy, how about you?’
‘Appendectomy. But I’m flying solo today, Mrs Chung said.’
Beth hastily revised her judgements, especially when the woman in blue slid her phone into a handbag almost as exhausted as Beth’s own.
For a moment, she imagined a Dulwich in which everyone was colour-coded according to their income – or ambitions. Belinda MacKenzie would be in gold, with go-faster stripes; Katie in sunny yellow. What would she be in? Probably the same dingy grey she was wearing now, she thought, looking down at her uniform of sweater, jeans, and boots. Time to turn her thoughts back to crime.
Chapter Fourteen
Harry York was standing in the thick of what seemed to be a huge milling crowd of elderly folk. The autumn sunlight poured through the windows of the former ballroom, glancing off silvery heads, a Zimmer frame, and a walking stick. He was starting to feel uncomfortably hot in his navy jacket.
He’d thought all this would only ta
ke a moment. He’d reckoned without the complications of getting everyone up the stairs quickly, gathering them here, and now, the final step which seemed to be beyond him, getting their attention. This was ridiculous. He’d quelled full-blown riots in less time than this was taking.
He strode to the front of the room and cleared his throat. The din around him rose up a notch. He tried again. Nothing. He clapped his hands together, and one or two of the people in front misunderstood and joined in, giving him a spontaneous, if unearned, round of applause. When it died away, he finally had silence. He leapt in before anything else could go wrong.
‘Thank you all so much for arriving early today. I understand you’ll be playing bridge later…’ There was a bit of a murmur as a few of the audience looked yearningly towards the bidding boxes and cards already on the tables. Harry hurried on before he lost them again.
‘Well, as you know, we’ve had one or two very serious, erm, incidents within the Bridge Club recently. Now, I’m going to need your help to sort this lot out,’ he said, beaming down expectantly at his audience like a progressive headteacher begging the pupils not to vandalise the premises.
‘Do you mean the murders?’ said a dry voice at the back of the room.
The audience shuffled a little to either side, parting like a rather slow-mo Red Sea, eventually giving Harry a glimpse of his heckler. He was a man in his later years, wearing a very correct check jacket and tie, with white hair collected into two tufts over his ears, like a cartoon professor.
‘Well, erm, it’s one murder so far…’ Harry said, then kicked himself and came to an abrupt halt. Damn. He tried again. ‘That is to say, we’re not making any announcements yet on that, erm, extremely regrettable happening. I’d just like to appeal for your help on some issues that could help us with our enquiries pertaining to the matter,’ he said, painfully aware that he was using appalling management-speak jargon and, even worse, that a pleading note had entered his voice. This was definitely a tough crowd. He coughed a little and started afresh in a deeper tone which, he hoped, brooked no argument.
‘I’d like to ask you all to show any medications you have to my officer stationed by the door here,’ he said, indicating Narinda Khan, the PC he was trying to train up. She looked at him with an unquestionable spark of fear as the crowd began to advance inexorably towards her.
‘Now, if you could form an orderly queue, please. One at a time, there, one at a time,’ said Harry, but it was to no avail, as a press of pensioners, rattling pill bottles, pushed forward.
***
‘Well, that was a disaster, wasn’t it?’ Harry pushed his hand through his rough blond hair and looked ruefully at Narinda Khan, who in turn was surveying a table mounded high with drugs. They’d moved to a small side room when it had seemed clear that the volume of medications was much more than one PC could reasonably be expected to stuff into her pockets.
The Bridge Club was now back in the ballroom, thank goodness, tranquilised by Deidre MacBride who’d popped up just in time to announce that play was starting. It was amazing how the cards calmed them. There was barely a murmur now, and when Harry had last poked his head round the door, every table with its green baize cloth had had a peaceful quartet arranged around it, scrutinising the cards as though their lives depended on them.
Harry certainly hadn’t been able to think of a good reason to delay proceedings. He just hoped he didn’t get lynched by a roomful of angry pensioners when they realised the drugs were hopelessly mixed up. ‘Did you even manage to note down whose stuff was whose?’
Narinda shook her head infinitesimally and could barely meet Harry’s eyes. ‘But they’ll know which bottles are theirs, won’t they, when they come and collect it all?’
‘Will they?’ Harry asked heavily. If they were anything like his mother, who was still a lot younger than this bunch, they wouldn’t remember which room to come to, let alone be capable of collecting their own prescriptions. But he was probably being silly. If they were all sharp enough to play bridge so well, they’d be able to recognise their own medications. Surely? He ran a hand over the brown bottles, packets of pills, and phials of drops. Some of them did have names on, which was a blessing. But not all.
‘Do you think there’s even any atropine here?’ Narinda asked diffidently.
‘Nothing’s marked atropine, that’s for sure. But we’d need to Google all these different prescriptions, I suppose, to check whether any contain it. We could basically be here forever.’
‘Unless you got a helpful retired doctor who could give you a hand?’ said a voice from the doorway. ‘I was going to knock, but I didn’t want to interrupt your chat.’ It was the elderly chap with the tufts of hair, which were now accessorised with a rather merry smile.
Harry stepped forward. ‘Of course, sir, do come in. So, you’re a doctor?’
‘That’s right, Dr John Kendall. GP of this parish, for my sins, for forty-odd years. Only retired a couple of years ago; my nephew’s got the practice now. I know most of the bridge group, treated them or their children – or grandchildren – over the years. And I know which drugs contain atropine.’
They were the magic words.
‘Come in, sit down.’ Harry looked around wildly. The room was small and evidently rarely used. Other than the cluttered table, there was nothing else there, apart from a couple of stands in the corner for displaying large floral arrangements for wedding receptions. ‘Khan, fetch a chair for the doctor, please. If you wouldn’t mind having a look at this little lot, sir, you could really help us out.’
‘Got a bit more than you bargained for, didn’t you?’
‘You could say that,’ Harry admitted ruefully, surveying the mountain of pills.
‘Seventy-five per cent of people over fifty are on medication. And of those, fifty per cent take four or more types of drug,’ the doctor smiled.
‘Wow. In that case, perhaps I should have expected even more than this little lot?’
‘I’d say so. In the general population, we are heavily medicated at the best of times. But of course, in Dulwich, you’re dealing with a high median level of fitness. People here live longer, healthier lives than in, well, outlying areas,’ the doctor added, with a sympathetic wince at what those outside this charmed postcode might need to swill down to sustain normal life.
Narinda came back in with one of the spindly chairs from the ballroom, and the doctor sat gratefully and started to pick away at the pill mountain. Moving a bottle at the foothills caused a small avalanche, but after quite a while he seemed to have found what he was looking for. He withdrew both hands from the table, each clasped around something. His hands were large and capable.
Like a magician putting the final touches to his favourite trick, he opened both fists with a flourish. Lying on each palm was a small vial. One was white plastic and was the sort you’d buy over the counter at Boots. The other was a more traditional, brown glass bottle, the type that Harry could imagine an old-school apothecary dishing out.
‘Which of these do you think contains the deadly poison atropine?’ said the doctor, twinkling again. Harry looked at him severely. This was no joking matter. But he was willing to humour the man. To an extent.
‘I’d say the brown one, sir. But enlighten me.’
‘You’re wrong. This one is just common or garden saline. Probably used to ease nasal congestion. We give it to mothers to help their babies with snuffles, and it’s good in the later stages of life, too, to, ah, soften things up.’
Harry blanched but his searching glance didn’t falter. The man was obviously enjoying his time in the spotlight. Doctors were by no means infallible, but they got used to having all the answers and being treated with plenty of awed respect by their patients. Presumably, opportunities to command such attention grew a lot sparser when one was retired. Harry allowed him his moment.
‘So, it’s the bog standard one that’s the potential killer. Who’d have thought it?’ he said obligingly, glancing at Khan
with a raised eyebrow. She looked appropriately impressed.
‘Of course, it’s not sold as a poison. It’s just plain old eye drops. For those little irritations,’ the doctor explained. ‘A lot of people suffer from hay fever around here. We have quite a few plane trees in the area, they’re a terrible nuisance. I don’t know if you’re a sufferer?’
Harry was tempted to say he didn’t have time for hay fever. There were so many other major irritations ready to get under his skin, pollen was the least of his problems. But he knew that for those prone to it, it was a blight which ruined the summer months.
‘So, does atropine do the job then, for hay fever? And how come it’s sold over the counter?’
‘Well, it’s a case of what you don’t know won’t hurt you. A lot of common compounds can be deadly, if used in the wrong way. But who would know that adding a dash of that or a teaspoon of the other could result in death? If we don’t advertise the fact, then usually we don’t have a problem. We must be dealing with someone who has a modicum of medical knowledge.’
‘Someone like yourself, then, sir?’ asked Harry, raising an eyebrow.
‘Rather more than a modicum, in my case. And wouldn’t it make me a rather obvious suspect? Besides, I think you’ll find that I wasn’t actually at the gathering when the lamentable incident occurred.’
‘Which lamentable incident might that be, then?’ Harry’s blue eyes were at their most piercing.
‘The murder, of course. Of Alfred Pole.’ For the first time, the doctor looked a little less sure of his ground. ‘That is what we’re talking about, isn’t it?’
‘Thank you so much for your help, Doctor. I’ll just take this, if I may,’ said Harry, holding out an empty plastic evidence bag so that the doctor could drop the phial into it. After a moment’s hesitation, when the elderly man seemed to realise for the first time that his fingerprints were now all over a potential murder weapon, he let go of the little bottle and it plopped into the bag, which Harry then sealed.